It's a little after 8:00pm on the night of the recall election - the election to remove (or not) California Governor Gavin Newsom.
I really have no idea which way it's going to go, and I'm not even sure I care. On the one hand, it would be awesome to give the criminal Newsom a public black eye, and to get him out of office.
But on the other hand…
I know that as much as it may seem as if what California has become can be laid at the feet of one man, the source of our problems is much much deeper. And I worry that if Newsom is recalled, it may generate complacency among those of us who are of the anti-totalitarian persuasion, and we may ease up just a little on the work we need to be doing to ensure that nothing like this can ever ever happen again.
So I don't know. But I guess what I do know is that however this election turns out, my work remains the same.
And I also know that the real battle is not between people who want one person to rule over them vs. those who want another person to rule over them - but between those who want rulers and those who do not. Between those who believe that a majority of people voting for a thing renders the forcible imposition of that thing legitimate, and those of us who do not.
And no election is going to address any of that.
So, even though I did vote (yes to recall the bastard), I can honestly say I am ambivalent about which way it goes.
Which is fine, because as I said, what I have to do doesn't change all that much - not at all really - based on the outcome of the recall election.
So I spent tonight doing what I usually do, lots of chores, a few tasks regarding the upcoming launch of our new education initiative (see here for details!) - and helping our son make custard.
Our teenage son happens to be a brilliant cook, and he recently discovered custard. Not the kind you bake, but the kind that goes inside choux pastries and on some tarts. He hasn't attempted the pastry part yet, but he's done an awesome job with the custard and I'm really proud of him. (And when I say I "helped" him, I mean he let me stir a little when his hand got tired.)
Here's something I noticed about making custard.
Once all the ingredients are blended, and you're stirring or whisking it on the stove, it can be frustrating because for a long time it can seem like nothing is changing, but then you get to a point where you recognize that something is changing. And it's an interesting little spot in the cooking process. Because the custard isn't yet thick, and I'm not even sure I'd say it's "thickening". The consistency doesn't seem to be any different yet. But something has changed. There are fewer bubbles now, and it all seems to be "coming together" somehow. It's a little hard to explain actually.
And I think that's where we are now. By "we", I don't just mean Californians, or even just Americans. I think I might mean the whole world. At least the parts of the world that have been upended by the Covid tyranny.
What do I mean by that? I DON'T KNOW. I just know that when I take a step back and try to look at the world I live in from some sort of distance, as if I were an outsider, something has really shifted.
Obviously, we've all been experiencing an unprecedented (in the US, UK, and parts of Europe anyway. Probably also Australia) level of outright totalitarian tyranny for going on two years now. But that's not what I mean.
What I mean is that there is a real chaos to things now that wasn't there before. A genuine weirdness - from the fact that the person sitting in the Oval Office is very openly senile, to the complete lack of logic behind "vaccine passports" for a vaccine that - again, openly - does not prevent transmission, the resignations of top FDA officials, the now regular flip-flopping on major issues by public-health bigwigs, the quite literally Orwellian (and again, very open) altering of official definitions of long-established medical terminology to suit a political agenda, to… well, pretty much EVERYTHING about California.
What's weird about it is not the chaos itself - I think that can be explained. What's weird is that there are still a whole lot of people who don't recognize it as chaos. Who don't see the lack of logic, or question the altering of definitions, or maybe even think that there is anything at all amiss in this whole experiment in total statism.
And what seems to be happening now is that the divide between those who recognize the chaos and those who do not is widening very quickly.
We are at some sort of critical point now. The dimension of our world that is made up of our connections to one another, of our social groups, our "tribes", and even our friends and our families, that dimension has undergone unprecedented seismic shifts over the past 18-plus months, and that shifting seems to be coming to a head now.
The consistency of the custard is changing. It's not yet "thick", and it's not yet clear just how it's going to turn out. But the very chemistry of things is different now. Some elements have been separated from each other, and other elements have become bound very much together.
What is this all going to mean? I honestly don't know. But I believe that it is very significant, and I also believe that this shifting will mean unprecedented opportunities for real change.
So I'm going to stay focused on the things I can do to help bring about that change. To help bring about genuinely free societies. And one thing I am more certain of now than ever before is that it won't be elections that bring about the kind of change that we need to be free.